I’ve taught mostly juniors and seniors for the past 12 years, so certain times of year you’re guaranteed to find me spending the weekend writing letters of recommendation for college applications. It goes with the job.

While I’m generally averse to extra weekend paperwork (especially from the procrastinating kid that asks a day before the deadline), I secretly like penning these rites of passage. Perhaps I’ve been in teaching too long, but for many kids, it’s the first time they’ve had to deliberately ask for direct feedback from an adult.

Depending on the school, there are boxes you check or paragraphs you may write about how well you know this kid and what kind of person they are. They may not actually read the responses themselves, but these papers are proverbial mirrors that reflect the impression a student has given a person that knows them well. And I know you kid-really, really well.

You’ve been in my class for a year or two. We interact for several hours each day. I don’t know all about your personal life (you definitely have no clue about mine), but we have a relationship that will be surprisingly similar to the ones you will have as a grown-up with most of the people you meet. People you work with, your future neighbors, parents of your children’s friends- these are all relationships between people that have no obligation to love you, but for whom you hope to have mutual respect and feelings of goodwill as well as the ability to contribute in a meaningful way. My classroom is a place to practice that, right along with your academic skills. How have you actually been doing?

Dear Sir or Madam:

Alexis does poorly on quizzes and tests, because she is incredibly self-critical and second-guesses most of her answers. I’m not positive where she gets this from, but have met her mother twice and am pretty sure it’s going to take a few good years of therapy to address. I want you to understand that the C she earned in my Biology class does not reflect her willingness to always work with a student on the autism spectrum, whom most just ignore. Alexis is the only student I’ve ever seen him talk to without being prompted. She doesn’t know this, but that’s on his IEP as one of the few signs of progress this year.

Sincerely,

Ms. Ridge

Dear Sir or Madam:

Korban has an A in my class because every time he earned a B on anything, his father spoke with my administrator. She was a theater major before becoming a principal, which makes her comfortable changing his grade in Physics.

Sincerely,

Ms. Ridge

Dear Sir or Madam:

Zoe has no interest in going to college. She is a dancer and is filling out this application so that she can continue to dance. She will go to your classes and graduate with a decent GPA, but it is very important that we get out of her way and just let her do what she does best.

Sincerely,

Ms. Ridge

Dear Sir or Madam:

I have no idea what kind of home Justin returns to after school, but I know that it takes a lot of effort for him to get here each day. He takes two different city buses to get to my class in the morning and one of them runs only every 40 minutes. So that he isn’t counted tardy, he takes the earlier one and I sometimes find him sound asleep sitting up against the wall by my door when he makes it in before I do. Sometimes the bus is late, and I have to mark him tardy just like the kid who pulls up 15 minutes later in an Audi with a $4 cup of coffee. I wish I didn’t.

Sincerely,

Ms. Ridge

Dear Student:

I am happy to spend my Saturday checking boxes about your motivation and commitment to academic excellence, as long as you’ll spend your time at college differently than you have your time with me in high school. You’ve done well in my classes to get into a good college, and you’ll do well in college to get into a good job. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t be writing this letter for you. What will all this “get you into,” however? Please take some time to figure out what makes you unique in a way that these boxes can’t contain, and how that can contribute to our world. Figure out what you’re “into.” Figure out why we should care.

Major in that.

]]>Agile Methodology in Love: The Value of the Retrospectivehttp://www.perennialgrowth.org/?p=205
Mon, 12 Jun 2017 18:04:42 +0000http://www.perennialgrowth.org/?p=205There’s a lot of reasons why we don’t run a marriage like a business (can you imagine the overtime pay?!), but there are a couple of great ideas worth bringing home from the office.

Photo credit: Luigi Mengato

Almost every well-managed business in any industry will take the time to review and reflect on the work from the previous year(s). Perhaps it’s around tax season or at the end of the fiscal year, or when working with shareholders or advisory groups. The idea of the retrospective comes from the need to decide what impact past decisions have had on the overall outcome of events and garner any insight from that process to help shape future decisions. It also gives an organization a chance to celebrate what’s gone well and identify areas that need addressing.

Taking a cue from the tech industry, this concept of small, frequent course corrections are often more successful than big, long-term releases of projects. Agile methodology focuses on short-term iterations and incremental improvements. This approach can easily be applied to your most important relationship- with your partner.

In its strongest state, your union gives you the opportunity to do this both personally, and as a couple. Together, you have someone to help remember and reflect on the events of the past year, identifying pivotal moments that might not have registered or by offering a different perspective or version of the story than you have. It’s valuable to have someone there to celebrate your success on individual goals and to discuss strategies with for those that eluded you this year. Truthfully, this is one of the reasons why we couple up in the first place, right?

Photo credit: Magnus D

Elements of an Effective Retrospective:

The Schedule: shareholders might meet quarterly, but we’ve found it easiest to have one larger retrospective in January (during the annual State of the Union) with a shorter check-in sometime mid-year. Give yourselves a couple of hours in a pleasant setting, preferably with beverages. Bring a laptop or other means of recording your ideas.

The Agenda: a retrospective should have an agenda, divided up into the categories you which to address. A good template would cover things like personal goals (health, career, self-improvement) as well as shared ones (finance, communication, sex, social life, etc.). Post-its, Google docs, poster paper…whatever works for you guys.

The Celebration: you’ve got to celebrate what’s going well. Cheers to what’s been working. What has contributed to that success? How can that continue? Any way to apply that to other categories in your lives?

The Challenges: you are going to have some. Rather than waiting until something drives you crazy, here’s a change to talk about changes you’d like to make (or would like, ahem, others to make) in the coming year. Note: this is a good time to listen as much as you talk.

The Road Forward (technically, the prospective): come up with some plans. Again, these can be small, seemingly insignificant changes (or huge ones) you’d like to create in your lives over the next year or so. Less screen time, more walks after dinner- whatever floats your boat, or theirs, or (ideally) both of yours together.

An undergraduate degree in anthropology and many years of cross-cultural exchange work make the above statement both insensitive and undiplomatic, but no less true. There is trash on the streets, flowing in the water and floating in the air.

It is hard for most people to walk, wash or breathe in a healthy way in many of India’s urban centers. In the rural areas, lack of access to sanitation makes statistics about the country’s quickly rising economy seem petty, borderline insulting.

In order to avoid the filth, most of my neighbors stay inside. The Indian home, in stark contrast to the Indian street, is usually spotless. Clean floors, clean water (bought in large bottles) and cleanly wholesome entertainment options make it possible to sidestep what is dirty for a good part of the day if you have the means. I find myself inside more often, especially on days when the air quality index urges us to, giving me a chance to catch up on reading.

I had struggled through Voltaire in high school, with too little life experience to apply its content in any context. I remember throwing Candide across the room after one particularly brutal chapter. The main character, at the end of a life that started in comfort and ends, after a spectacular spree of misfortune, in misery, is resigned to a simple life of farming. The quote most hotly discussed in class by those who had read the crib notes, “il faut cultiver son jardin,” roughly translates to “tend your own garden.” According to my under-developed interpretation, this basically suggests that one should just worry about themselves. Crap advice for a teenager, and I didn’t pick up Voltaire again until yesterday, more than 20 years later.

In any country with a wide range of income disparity, political corruption and sense of fatalism, it’s attractive to turn inward, worrying only about affairs that are within one’s power to address. “Tending one’s own garden” is possible, tangible, and distracting. It is not, however, sustainably gratifying if one look over the fence shows the unsightly heaps and unsavory smells in which others must sow their own lives.

New government initiatives, like Swachh Bharat (Clean India) are trying to address the filth.

Celebrities with gloves and trash bags take photos picking up garbage. New toilets are being built in rural schools and communities over the next few years. Discussions are happening around municipal waste facilities. Posters and videos urging everyone to do their part are amplified by innovative apps and social media campaigning that hopes to make India more like its postcards. The efforts are aided by a generation that wants to step outside their own gardens (at least, metaphorically).

Recently, in a blog posted in the Times of India, author Chetan Bhagat points out the disparity between the cleanliness of the typical Indian home with the rubbish heap of communal spaces. As a writer with the ear (or eye) of Indian youth, he urges readers to stop delineating between their “own” space and “our” collective space. If everyone just tended the 10 meters outside their own home, then perhaps in a country with so many people, the trash will take care of itself.

Picking up Voltaire on a used book table, I puzzled over this garden metaphor. Put into the context of the long-suffering Candide and his futile quests around “the best of all possible worlds,” I wondered if I’d misinterpreted this perceived axiom. Maybe he and the withered Cunégonde weren’t advising us to tell the rest of the world to piss off, but to instead find satisfaction in cultivating what little change one is capable of.

I can keep 10 meters clean. So can you.

Part of the joy of gardening is transformation. To harvest the potential of small seeds requires time, patience and care. I look forward to seeing the Swachh Bharat movement grow. I worry that not everyone will like to get their hands dirty, but in the end, we all reap exactly what we sow.

]]>http://www.perennialgrowth.org/?feed=rss2&p=10A Terrible Teacher Tells Allhttp://www.perennialgrowth.org/?p=203
Thu, 08 Oct 2015 18:01:46 +0000http://www.perennialgrowth.org/?p=203As a new teacher starting out almost 14 years ago, I had no idea how terrible I was at the time. Convinced I would revolutionize the craft with my engaging lessons, dynamite presentations and outrageously strong rapport with students, compassionate observers gave me gentle proddings and consistent advice that eventually taught me to shut up and listen. This gave me a chance to watch and learn. Like any fine craftsmanship, good teaching comes from many long hours spent making small mistakes and polishing worthy pieces. So much can be learned from watching a master at work and, if you’re lucky, you’ll have the opportunity to apprentice under a great one.There is certainly the potential for raw talent capable of producing masterpieces, but more often, I found myself sweeping up the pieces and moving on to the next project without time to critique my work.

After 14 years of practice, I now know exactly how terrible of a teacher I am. Shocked? Don’t be. This is precisely the sort of teacher you want in your child’s classroom. I’ve watched masterful moments unfold on my watch. Students are engaged, excited to be there, and grasping concepts outside their reach from when they walked in the door. They are applying what they’ve learned in a lesson to a real-world problem and worked together to generate a solution.They walk in before the bell rings to tell me about something they’ve noticed that relates to what we’ve been learning and left my room with connections to what they’ll be learning in another classroom down the hall. This happens precisely because I’ve realized that, in any lesson, there are things I’ve done terribly and that I need to study, observe, learn and make more mistakes, if I ever hope to improve.

Complacency is the death knell of innovative teaching.

As a new teacher, you have no hope of keeping your head above water. The first few years of teaching feel like violently drowning and washing up on the shores of Spring Break. You may think you are innovating, and indeed may find yourself in the midst of a truly engaging lesson, only to be hit with a wave of ungraded, disorganized papers you’d rather recycle than sift through on a Saturday morning. As you learn from advice and experience new systems to help you tread the currents of parent-teacher conferences and classroom management, you begin to grasp success more often and eventually (usually around year five) begin to sail through waters that used to leave you swirling. Be careful.

The Sirens’ song of sticking to “what works” is tempting.

I’ve heard it calling lustfully from my file cabinet on a Friday afternoon when I’m fighting off the flu. It tells me it’s okay to use a lesson plan from last year that delivered content- but did not necessarily encourage collaboration. You’ve finally found footing on solid ground, which makes it hard to step off into uncharted waters, like trying new technology or introducing new methodologies. It’s these times when being a terrible teacher makes me want to be a better student.

Learning from other teachers is essential, and we can only do this well when we recognize where we are weak.

People with huge egos rarely go into teaching. If you do start off that way, a few well-aimed outbursts by parents and students certainly bring you down to eye-level. What shreds of confidence you can swaddle around you after listening to what’s wrong with education these days still needs to come down. We must be vulnerable to both failure and ridicule if we hope to learn anything new. Fortunately, we’ve had lots of practice by now.

Professional development comes in many forms, but the best kinds rarely come to your school auditorium on PD days.

Only we know what makes us a terrible teacher. I lose papers and have taken ten days to grade an assignment, but there’s an app for that, literally. Using technology like Learning Management Systems to help design short assessments that self-grade have freed me up to give more valuable feedback on formal assessments. I suck at student-centered learning. My default pedagogy is pedantic lecturing. Attending inquiry-based conferences has helped. Buying some initial curriculum based on student collaboration has improved this. Watching masterful teachers gives me strategies for implementing new approaches that support this model. I’m still terrible, but I am so much better than I was last year.

To be comfortable admitting where I’m weak, I need to know I won’t be attacked for struggling.

There are many sharks circling the waters of education these days. I don’t know what currents you are swimming against in your practice, but you must save yourself. Find the educators out there making waves in 21st century education and cling to them like a lifeboat. Buoy yourself up by applying for grants to attend conferences offering training you need. Seek out experiences like IREX’s Teachers for Global Classrooms, or one of Fulbright’s several programs that expose teachers to global best practices in education through travel and cultural exchange. Attend that webinar. Try something new. Fail at it miserably. Try again.